I am—er—uh—a Tarck

Most people have never seen one, but I own a painting of a tarck. It is, quite simply, a fish with feet, a triangular dorsal fin, and ten stumpy legs, not in pairs, but from front to back. Each leg has three or four small toes, which are close enough together that they aid in swimming. The tarck’s body has vertical black stripes, but from face to mid-body, it’s grey. The rest of it, including the tail, is orange. The fin and legs are colored in the reverse. It has big eyes and the whiskers of a cat.

I fell in love with this painting—and, because I could not help it, the tarck itself—the first time I saw it. When I found out the artist was the third-grade daughter of my friend, I bought it for $25. It hangs on the wall next to my computer.

The other day, I took down a signed litho from Carnival, a colorful, Warholesque painting in a gold frame, in order to put up sets of photographs I’ve taken over the past year. I am about to move it to the tarck's location, which is large enough to accomodate the Carnival print. The tarck will move to the opposite wall.

But I'm thinking about this now because the artist, Cassidy Vogel, now a fifth grader at my daughter's school, has just told her mom that she will not be taking the Saturday art class in January. She can’t draw. If you can’t draw, she said, you can’t be an artist.

I resemble that statement.

It’s a funny thing about the word. In some circles, people know me as—one of those. They will introduce me to others, who will say, “Are you the artist who—?” I respond, “I made the mosaic of—, yes.” I can't get comfortable with that word.

I make things. I take pictures. Last month, I knitted three scarves and four hats, made three mosaic mirrors, a dreidel, and a plaque. I took hundreds of photographs. Over the summer, I made a stained glass mosaic buffet, which is supposed to land me on HGTV. Last month, my crab for Baltimore’s Crabtown Project sold for ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars! On January 13th, I will be hanging an art show at St. Paul’s school.

Yet I am not an artist, and I wonder, now that Cassidy mentions it, whether it’s because I cannot draw.

Over the weekend, my daughter and her photogenic friend, Margot, made Christmas ornaments out of dough and painted them. When they finished, Margot swirled the remaining paint all around her paper plate with her brush until it was a very wet sea of thick strokes in bold colors and brown. “I’m making art!” she said. She went on to tell me her very mature philosophy about what art is. “Art can be anything you want it to be.”

My daughter seems pretty clear about it, too. Unlike her mother, she can draw, and I have a fridge to prove it. She is less adept, however, at the little sculptural details. Where Margo rolls her shapes freeform, Serena cuts them out with cookie cutters and concentrates more on painting. Last night, she drew and colored in the Powerpuff Girls while watching the video. They were perfect!

Despite my lack of drawing (and painting) talent, I was always an imaginative student. Ed Smith, my eleventh-grade art teacher, who recently passed away, encouraged me with comments like “stupendous” and “magnificent” scrawled on the back of my poster boards of invented fonts and logos. Before that, Nolan Simon, hung my crazy stuffed clown from his ceiling and kept my Rod Stewart pillow in his classroom for decades. Though I still can’t draw, I went on to get a Master’s degree in design. I found my niche for arranging interesting elements.

But at 43, I cannot bring myself to tell someone who asks what I do that I am an artist. I can say I am a writer, a designer, a teacher, a mother, a wife, and a cake lover. I can say, “I made the crab that sat outside The Gallery at Harborplace.” I can even say I am a mosaicist. But I can’t call myself an artist without feeling awkward. It’s like the Fonz trying to say that he was wrong.

I do know that without my childhood foundations in drawing, photography, and design, I wouldn’t have this dilemma. I probably wouldn't have art, either—and I might not have some of my other interests and curiosities. We need those lessons to discover who we are and where we fit in. Kids whose creativity was nurtured grow up to become scientists, too—and mathematicians, astronauts, musicians, teachers, and dreamers who do. (Alas, not enough of them grow up to be presidents; if they did, we would be rich with ideas that solve problems.)

Were you to see my painting of the tarck in my dining room, you might not know it was painted by a child; lots of adults work hard to imitate this style. The tarck displays a sophisticated use of space. It is well-balanced, both in object placement and color. It shows the skills of a person who might have a knack for arrangement. Maybe she is an inventor, an idea person. Perhaps, like me, she'll enjoy working with other people's objects and creating them into something all her own. She certainly has the encouragement. How many people do we know who have sold their work by age nine?

My bio (otherwise known as an artist's statment) says, “I enjoy breaking things and putting them back together in a random, yet tasteful, order.”

I cannot draw. But I might have to face the fact that I am—er—uh—a tarck.

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How has an art lesson helped you become the person you are today?